Moral Choices and Global Desires: Feminine Identity in a Transnational Realm

Abstract

Global changes during the last three decades have greatly altered the spatial and moral orientations of individuals in Nepal. This has caused a reordering of gender relations that has influenced the life experience of many women, challenging existing notions of feminine identity. Here, I apply a feminist psychological anthropology to understanding the ways in which social transformations in Nepal have shaped the hopes, ideals, and actions of a particular young woman who has been empowered, rather than burdened and displaced, by the changes of globalization. Her example shows how an analysis of individual lives can illuminate the motivating forces and differential effects of globalization and demonstrates that attention to gender is necessary for understanding the complex relationship between power and experience.

Applying Nepali Ethnopsychology to Psychotherapy for the Treatment of Mental Illness and Prevention of Suicide Among Bhutanese Refugees

“…For example, mind–body divisions have been observed from West Africa to the Indian subcontinent (Desjarlais 1992; Fox 2003). Gendered frameworks of emotions are present from Pacific islands to Himalayan mountains (Lutz 1988; McHugh 1989, 2004). Other aspects of ethnopsychology, such as the role of the spirit or soul, are important in both Western psychotherapy (Griffith 2010; Griffith and Griffith 2002) and in other cultural healing practices (Desjarlais 1992; Wikan 1989).…”

Objectified Body Consciousness in a Developing Country: A Comparison of Mothers and Daughters in the US and Nepal

“…In this study, we compared the U.S. with Nepal, a culture relatively secluded from Western influence, in order to examine cultural effects on women's objectification of the body. Moreover, globalization is affecting even relatively isolated cultures such as Nepal (Liechty 2003;McHugh 2004). Thus, we compared two generations of women within each culture.…”

Resistance

“…17 McHugh's (2004) case study of a Gurung woman from a nearby Nepali village makes a striking contrast with this one. Unlike Sarita, McHugh's informant had experienced a more complete and smooth transition to modernity, resulting in little inner conflict.…”

“…6 McHugh (2002 has discussed a similar phenomenon in a Gurung village in rural Nepal where young, unmarried women are taught to fear peripheries of villages where ban manche (forest men) are believed to reside and prey on them. McHugh (2004) has recently discussed a case study of a young woman, freed from most of the constraints of patriarchy, who, while she does not doubt that the ban manche once existed, is convinced that they are now gone from the forests. McHugh argues that patriarchy creates distinctive pressures on women that produce inner tensions and conflicts which are externalized in symbolic form.…”